Blow for Syrian rebels as Assad forces seize Yabroud – and cut off key supply
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Syrian government troops seized the last rebel stronghold on the border with Lebanon on Sunday, choking off a vital supply line for the insurgency outside the capital.

The capture of Yabroud is the latest in a series of steady advances by the regime that, on the third anniversary of the conflict, is tipping the military balance in its favour.

The Syrianarmy, backed by members of the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah, entered Yabroud on Sunday morning, pushing all but the most diehard of rebel groups to the outskirts, government and opposition sources said.

"This new success ... is an important step towards securing the border area with Lebanon, and cutting off the roads and tightening the noose around the remaining terrorist cells in Damascus province," the Syrian military announced in a statement.

For more than a year, Yabroud was the last major opposition held town in Qalamoun province, west of Damascus.

Weapons and food supplies flowed through Yabroudfrom Lebanon and were smuggled to rebel pockets in Homs and the capital that were barely surviving under tight government sieges.

The town and its suburbs was also home to tens of thousands of families who had fled fighting in Damascus, Homs and Qusair – the other key town on the Lebanon border that fell to government forces last year.

But over the past few months, Hizbollah and the government worked together to take back Yabroud and the surrounding villages through a combination of locally negotiated ceasefires and brute military force.

Over the past eight months, artillery attacks increased on the town.

"This week the regime destroyed everything. They have launched so many air strikes. There is nothing left," one doctor, who fled Yabroud on Sunday morning told The Telegraph.

On Sunday morning, the army and loyalist militias launched their ground offensive, capturing most of the town and pushing rebel opponents to the outskirts, an AFP reporter who was with the Syrian military said.

An activist who fled to the Lebanon border town of Aarsal said "only a handful of rebel fighters are in the town. They will fight to the death".

The fight for Yabroud has caused thousands of refugees to flee to the small town of Aarsal, which lies in the no-man's-land between Lebanon and Syria and already hosts at least 51,000 Syrian refugees.

The Syrian army launched up to 20 air raids on the outskirts of Aarsal, targeting rebel fighter fleeing across the border, Lebanese security sources said.

The exodus into Aarsal has escalated sectarian enmity in Lebanon. Hizbollah has blamed a recent spate of bombings in it heartland Shia Muslim areas on Sunni opposition fighters from Yabroud, who they say are using Aarsal as a conduit through which to send explosives.